


The Shadow Over England

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Henry VI - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 1 - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2 - Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3 - Shakespeare, Richard III - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Elder God, Eldritch Horrors, Gen, Lovecraftian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 17:38:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2200827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan la Pucelle calls spirits from the vasty deep...and they come.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shadow Over England

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gileonnen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/gifts).



> Title is a riff on _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_ by H.P. Lovecraft, as are a number of the specific manifestations of this particular Elder God. Many thanks to my lovely beta-readers. To my recipient, I tried to get them to work together! Truly! But it turns out the people from the First Tet aren't very good at that...

They say the gods have always been with us.

 

They've written ballads about it in France--the miraculous Pucelle whose sweet songs had drawn the Deep Ones from their eternal slumber to grace our paltry world with their exalted presence. Worshipful mobs have pulled down the stained-glass windows in Paris and Reims and replaced them with carved stone panels intricate and terrible to behold.

 

Western Burgundy was the first to fall to the onslaught of the French armies led by Joan La Pucelle bearing her golden banner writhing with tentacles too numerous to count. Holland and Zeeland held out longer with aid from our shores, but all to no avail. Lorraine and Normandy followed, and the gallant knight René of Anjou offered his aid to the last of our men-at-arms in exchange for King Henry’s marriage to his treasured daughter Margaret.

 

We in England have remained blessedly free of the scourge, closed our borders and waited, but not without losses of our own. They sing prayers daily in Queen Margaret’s college in Cambridge for William duke of Suffolk, foully murdered by pirates who had turned their loyalties to France and those to whom the flour-de-luce had bound herself. Only his head washed up on the shore, and within days, there were riots in London. All was lost, they wailed, whipping themselves into a frenzy almost as great as the creatures in Paris.

 

It was my father who stopped the riots, they say. Not King Henry, nor his fair French queen, who it was said wept bitter tears for the loss of her beloved Suffolk, but Richard Plantagenet duke of York, thought by some to be England’s rightful king. It's only ever said in whispers, but everyone knows that whispers have power.

 

It was whispers, after all, that La Pucelle heard before St. Catherine's shrine in Domrémy, now a site of most hallowed pilgrimage. It was a sword she had sought there, but what she found was infinitely more powerful. Hidden beneath the altar was a secret chamber filled with ancient carvings and housing, on a stone lectern, the secret book of the gods known only as the _Necronomicon_.

 

What she found within its pages none in England dared to contemplate.

 

They say the gods have always been with us.

 

But it was La Pucelle who awakened them.

 

***

 

I was born hundreds of miles away from the battlefield where La Pucelle's monstrous cavalry cut through our armies like a scythe through wheat, but my father was there that day, watching as _things_ rose from the Garonne River to rip the great commander Lord Talbot and his son limb from limb before all the assembled English forces. I cannot question his choice, though all the realm did at first. He retreated, saved himself and his men by fleeing north. His was the first in a wave of such flights, as we realised, one by one, that we were no longer fighting men but monsters. His fellow commanders were slower to grasp this; the duke of Somerset, it was said, cursed my father for a coward as he drowned in his own blood.

 

The others were quick to take up that call at first. Until La Pucelle gave herself up outside Compiègne and sat in silence through weeks and weeks of trials for heresy, treason, and witchcraft, her fixed eyes and secret smile belying every plea that fell from her lips. They tried to burn her at the stake and the conflagration that ensued took the entire city of Rouen with her. The fires burned for days, and on the third, she emerged from the inferno, her skin blackened, her eyes a pair of burning coals, and her teeth filed to points. The shadow she cast writhed with a thousand serpentine coils, and what little of the English army remained fled before her in abject terror.

 

As the battles raged across France my mother fought her own against me. I suppose neither of us won, for I came into the world half-formed, Somerset's curse made manifest against Richard of York. In spite of that--perhaps even because of it--my father treated me just as he did my brothers, determined that even his accursed son would never forsake his family for the songs of fallen gods.

 

I never told him that the gods whispered to me no more than they whispered to anyone willing to give them hearing. Perhaps I knew even as a child that fear was far more powerful than love.

 

***

 

There was another god, of course, the one to whom my parents prayed continually for deliverance from the evil on the far side of the Channel. But he wanted none of me, nor I of him, imperfectly fashioned as I was with my crooked back and withered arm. I stubbornly insisted on learning to fight as my elder brothers did at least in part to protect myself, first from children and drunkards, and eventually, as I grew more skilled, from grown men.

 

It was only a short step from fighting them to killing them. From killing them to finding sport in it. Short steps even an ill-made man could take. And there were plenty to kill; not even men by the time they reached me but strange, scaly creatures, their skin hardened to gills and their eyes wide and staring. They would sometimes sneak past the blockade of ships guarding all the southern ports, or from the north through Scotland, where auld alliances held firm even when the world itself seemed on the brink of apocalypse.

 

I was in the north with my brothers and our cousin the earl of Warwick, cutting down the vermin in the Cumbrian hills, when we heard about the king.

 

There had been rumours that Henry's uncle the Lord Protector and his wife had come into possession of certain books during their time in Burgundy before all God-fearing people withdrew to the far side of the Channel. Nobody actually expected King Henry to open one of them.

 

He'd always been a bit... _funny_ was the word Warwick used, with the sort of uncomfortable smile that seemed both too tight and too vague at once. Perhaps that was why it took everyone so long to notice.

 

He took to spending more and more time in the scriptorium at Westminster, consumed by book after book from Gloucester's newly founded library in Oxford, all liberated long ago from the king of France's collection. Gloucester, himself, had died just before Suffolk's murder, but no one had thought to connect the two until the king refused to part from his uncle's library even when asked to open sessions of Parliament. Until he began to speak in tongues no man had ever heard on this side of the Channel.

 

Nobody knew then why Queen Margaret stood by him. Perhaps her duty to her anointed king and husband transcended even possession by the Deep Ones. Or perhaps she had never trusted my father and had found the best chance to be rid of him.

 

Either way, she got what she wanted.

 

It was Edward who saw their bodies first, strung up above the gates of York with their own viscera. Not just our father but our youngest brother Edmund beside him, all of twelve years old. Someone had put paper crowns on their heads, scrawled with the word _Unbeliever_.

 

We had no choice. I said it then and I'll say it till my dying day. _We had no choice_.

 

***

 

Later, I understood that she had done it all for her son--she'd allowed the Deep Ones to take King Henry if they spared Prince Edward. That changed nothing.

 

My eldest brother Edward rallied the terrified English armies behind him against Henry of Lancaster and his monstrous hordes. I am not so foolish as to say we defeated them--they are always there, waiting just beyond the waters--but at least we drove them back. We even captured Henry and held him in the darkest dungeons of the Tower to keep him away from the books.

 

A blessing in disguise in these dark times that it was Edward who was most of this world and least susceptible to the seductive whispers of the Deep Ones. His seduction was of a far more mundane variety, with hair of pale gold and a tongue like a wasp, who went by the name of Lady Elizabeth Grey.

 

Instead, they took George, my foolish, wayward brother, and the seemingly invulnerable Warwick. _False, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence_ , married to Warwick's daughter Isabel and carried in Warwick's wake when he joined forces with Louis of France in exchange for the highest of offices under a restored King Henry.

 

Queen Margaret, it seemed, had offered to make his younger daughter Anne a queen through marriage to her son Edward. George told me later that they'd intended to kill King Henry and put Prince Edward and Anne on the throne. I could believe it of Warwick, a born double-dealer if ever one breathed, but even when George turned back to our side on the night before we all converged on Warwick in the fields above Barnet, I wondered if he'd let the darkness whisper to him.

 

Edward told me Warwick thanked him on the field when he plunged a sword through his black, traitorous heart. _Henry must die_ , he whispered, _and the boy. The boy is tainted, no matter what the queen says. They taught him well in France_. And then, his hand clutching at Edward's mailed arm, _Not Anne, not my sweet Anne. Spare her, if ever you loved me_.

 

We met the queen and her princeling in a field hard by Tewkesbury. Speaking the incantations by rote, we three brothers one by one plunged daggers through the heart of Prince Edward of Lancaster while his mother begged us on her knees for mercy. We later learned that the imprisoned King Henry had let out such a howl at the moment of his son's death that the entire city of London could hear it. Perhaps there was just enough of the child-king left to mourn the boy he'd doomed to certain awful death.

 

And it was my footsteps, halting and uneven, that echoed in the corridors of the Tower as the blood moon rose on high.

 

Henry was kneeling before what had once been a prie-dieu, now disfigured with writhing, serpentine forms and eyes that seemed to follow me as I moved. He looked almost human, except when he tried to move, as though his skin were a garment that no longer fit.

 

"Of course they send you," he _hissed_ , his words coming from a thousand tongues at once. "Send a monster to kill a monster."

 

"We all have our place in this world, Your Grace." The dagger in my hand was of pure silver, glinting in the torchlight. If I were a God-fearing man, I would have taken comfort in its carved symbols, the tip anointed with the very oil that had made this man king of England so many years ago when he was little more than a babe in swaddling clothes. But I had never feared any god as I feared the Deep Ones who watched me now through King Henry's empty, gaping eyes.

 

"Why do you cling to those who would spurn you given half a chance? You know what you are; what they say of you."

 

"What of that?"

 

"You killed my boy." His head tilted to one side, the expression empty as a player's mask. "Butchered him."

 

"As you butchered my father and brother. Or do you not remember Wakefield?"

 

"I remember all of it." Henry's smile was a skull's grin, his eyes suddenly alive with horrors that would have left even the Florentine Dante mute. " _Miserere mei, Domine_." He threw his arms wide and I saw a great black bruise where his heart still beat, slow and dull, beneath his near-translucent skin.

 

They say I murdered him. I say I delivered him.

 

***

 

If Edward is the sun, I am the shadow. What George is, even he does not know, unless the answer hides at the bottom of a barrel of malmsey wine. _It is the only thing that drowns out the songs_ , he once confessed to me.

 

Edward cannot bear to kill him, but Edward has no stomach for wars that must be fought in darkness. Put him on a battlefield, banners at his side and a war-cry in his throat, and he is Hercules, his sword striking as true as St George. But that is no longer our world. For Crécy and Agincourt, we have the slaughters at Rouen and Bordeaux; and we men have despoiled our own land with little help from the Deep Ones as they laughed and watched.

 

George is in the Tower of London now. He locked himself there after the death of his wife--the court heard that she died in childbirth but a darker tale came to me from George himself, who had awakened one morning to find her beside him, her throat cut and the bloodied knife in his hand. _I dreamt I was fighting La Pucelle. It was her, I swear. I was going to kill her for Father_. He'd looked into my eyes. _Mercy, dear brother. Mercy, as you gave to King Henry_.

 

Edward cannot do it. He is the king; he must be above the darkness, the very sun of York. They already tell stories of me in the streets and alleys, by hearthfires and in dark, slimy corners. The king's butcher, Richard of Gloucester, who came into the world on a tide of blood and will leave one in his wake.

 

I cast no shadow but my own.


End file.
